"A deeply spiritual book...She honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women. She venerates the female soul."--The Washington Post Book WorldWithin every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr. Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul."The work of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, rooted in old and deep family rites and in archetypal psychology, recognizes that the soul is not lost, but has been put to sleep....This volume reminds us that we are nature for all our sophistication, that we are still wild, and the recovery of that vitality will itself set us right in the world."--Thomas Moore Author of Care of the Soul.

About the Author

Clarissa Pinkola Estes was born in Indiana in 1943 to parents of Spanish and Mexican ancestry, but was later adopted by Hungarian immigrants. She received her Ph.D. from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was certified as a Jungian analyst in 1984. She worked as a psychoanalyst in private practice and developed and taught the Writing as Liberation of the Spirit program in state and federal prisons. Estes served as executive director of the C.G. Jung Center for Education and Research and cofounded and codirected Colorado Authors for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights. One of Estes's better-known writings, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992), is drawn from tales and myths she heard firsthand from members of such cultures as Asian, Mexican, African, and Greek. She also wrote The Gift of Story (1993). Her books can be found indexed under Psychology, Women's Studies, Mythology, Spiritual Development, and Poetry.